Back in April I gave a presentation at the 2014 Marketo Marketing Nation Summit focused on practical, easy-to-implement tips to make your automation systems more scalable, efficient, and effective. The idea worked great on paper, but I bit off more that I could chew–fifteen tips is a lot of ground to cover in a 45 minute session, so I ended up having to provide more of a glimpse than in-depth guidance.
For those who expressed interest after the presentation in seeing the slides or learning more, I decided to do a deeper dive on these tips, and this article is just that.
The idea of this session came about, in part, because I always prefer going to sessions where I get practical, actionable advice. The content, however, came about from all the little shortcuts I or others have found to make things easier and more efficient when using Marketo. Many of these ideas have been submitted by users around the community, and also within the Marketo Seattle User Group. While I have this list of 15 tips, I’m sure you have others, so be sure to share them in the comments!
#1 – Folder Organization
Be honest, we all have some scary areas of our Marketo instances that are just a mess. I’ll be the first to admit it. The fact of the matter is, sometimes we create assets quickly, but don’t bother to give them a name that makes sense, or put them in a folder. It seems harmless at first, but after years of this stuff piling up, it’s pretty much impossible to figure out what is relevant and what isn’t.
I’m pretty crazy about organization and consistency in our Marketo instance, so I generally gravitate towards smart folder organization. Yet it’s doubly important when you have many users in your Marketo instance, each with their own ideas of how to organize and name things. Set a consistent process, write it down, and ensure everyone in your instance knows and follows it.
There’s no hard and fast way to do this, but I try and organize things with top level folders for the basic category, followed by subcategory, followed by year/month/quarter etc.
You also want to make use of archived folders where possible to indicate what’s no longer relevant for other users to be looking at.
#2 – Asset Naming Convention
The naming of your assets is closely related to folder organization. Again, there’s no hard and fast way to organize the names of your assets, but it’s important to set a naming convention and stick with it. Here’s a good litmus test of how big of a problem with naming conventions you have (this could also be made into the nerdiest marketing drinking game ever): Pick a form at random from the bowels of your design studio. Can you identify what form it is, the situations it’s used for, and any hidden field info, just from the name? No, well then take a drink,or read on…or do both.
You’ll be amazed at how much time you can waste trying to figure out which asset is which, when a lot of that can be avoided with some intelligent naming conventions. So suppose you’re naming forms. Don’t pick a crazy abbreviation that no one remembers. Pick something descriptive. Name the form that’s for webinar registrations: “webinar registration”. Another variable a lot of people don’t think about with forms in particular is the submit button text. I actually try to include that in the name where possible. It helps to avoid needing to check the asset incessantly.
While labeling things descriptively helps reduce confusion, it can also be handy for clever use of smart list triggers and filters. Suppose you want a particular type of email to be sent to the salesperson anytime someone fills out a webinar registration form.
Well, if you’ve done you due diligence and named your assets consistently, you can build a smart list that just looks for any form submissions that start with the words “Webinar Registration”. This is way easier than trying to remember every single form name that might qualify for the alert, and it helps future proof your triggers, because any time you add a new form under the same naming convention, it’ll automatically fit into your existing logic, without any need for you to add it in manually.
Thinking through your naming conventions can just help you find things easier and quicker, too. You can chronologically label occurring steps for an event program. Since Marketo organizes data alphabetically, with a bit of thought, you can organize your smart campaigns in a logical manner, rather than just where they occur in the alphabet. This is much easier to find what you’re looking for, as it’s a step by step list.
#3 – Sales Insight Email Organization
Special consideration with organization must be made for sales insight emails, which are emails you’ve published as templates for your sales team in Salesforce.com or whatever CRM you’re using. I make heavy use of Marketo Sales Insight, to the point where I’ve got dozens of these templates available, with new resources being added weekly, so helping my team understand which email is which is super important.
Because of the nature of how Marketo Sales Insight published emails work, I’ve found it makes much more sense to keep all our published emails in one location. I have folders for different points of sale, with further folder definition for sales vs account management templates. Then, each asset is prepended with an identifier of which team should use which asset.
If you look at how it appears for the salesperson, this is way easier to decode which email is which than if everything is randomly named with no folder organization.
Another tip here is to make use of the description field on your email assets in Marketo. This description will carry over to the Marketo Sales Insight interface, to help give the salesperson a bit more insight on what the template is for. If you have a ton of templates in your instance, you can’t possibly hope for your sales team to remember what every single template is for. So this description field is really helpful.
#4 – Global Forms
When I talk about global forms, I basically mean the concept of using a single form on multiple landing pages. In other words, not creating a new form every time you have a new campaign.
Using forms globally where possible is a great idea, because it will reduce the amount of single-use assets that are hanging out in your instance, but it also makes your system for alerts, scoring, and other data management tasks much easier. Imagine you wanted to create one scoring rule that watches any time a resource download form is submitted. If you had a unique form for every whitepaper, case study, and infographic you ever made, you’d need to account for a lot of forms.
It’s also fantastic when you want to make large, sweeping changes to your forms at once. Suppose you now need to start asking a new piece of information on all your forms. With a global form, you make the change in one place, and have it propogated out to all your landing pages that use it at once.
#5 – Global Emails
Just like forms, some of the emails you use, both internally and externally, can be made global in Marketo. There’s two great examples here.
Think about all the email alerts you set up, either for yourself or for your sales team. In most cases, you’re basically telling them: “Hey, a lead did something, here’s all the relevant information to contact them.” You don’t need to create an alert for every situation, you can actually have a couple of generic alerts that trigger on a set of criteria. So, for example, you might have an alert that tells a salesperson that a high value form was submitted.
If you’re using common forms for things, and if you’re basically telling the salesperson the same thing each time, it actually does you a disservice to have a ton of different alerts. Your sales team is going to get overwhelmed, and isn’t going to know which alert is which, despite your best efforts.
So I generally advise keeping alerts simple so they can cover a wide swath of uses. You’ll have an easier time training your sales team to click through to salesforce to get the specific details of what’s going on with this lead.
One great tool to use in your alerts is the “SP_Send_Alert_Info” Token. This will automatically pull in the specific smart campaign that drove the action, a timestamp of the activity, and best of all: it links to the record in SFDC and Marketo.
You can also use the global email concept with autoresponders. If you send your resource downloads to leads via email, rather than letting them access the download directly on the website, you can use the same autoresponder for all your resource downloads. And of course, you can use tokens here too. Anytime someone downloads a piece of content from one of your programs, you can trigger a global autoresponder to fire, that populates all the specifics of the content. The email doesn’t even need to be local to the program.
#6 – Tokenized Programs
I received some interesting feedback from people who heard me using the word “Tokenize” in my presentation. I can’t claim credit for that, but I also can’t say who coined it originally (Har har har). Anyway, here’s the idea.
Consider your average webinar. Think about all the assets and logic that go into an event like this. You have emails, landing pages, and smart campaigns. And that’s for a simple event. And yet, most webinars are actually very similar in Marketo. You’re always following the same general process, yet creating and editing all these assets, even when you can clone past events, is so time consuming.
By building all your program assets with tokens, you can save a huge amount of time, and build more consistent, error-free programs.
So continuing the example of a webinar, let’s look at the tokens you can set on the program.
As you can see, nearly everything can be made into a token. Your webinar content, banners, logos, even the access information to the webinar. Thank you pages, and finally, even our On-Demand videos are tokenized.
This is huge for replication, because it means the only thing you’re editing is the tokens – no need to go into the assets at all. Another benefit of building programs like this is that any sorts of inconsistencies, such as the wrong date/time or dial in information, are minimized, because again, you’re setting the token value at one place, at it shows identically everywhere the token is referenced.
It turns a highly complex campaign into something anyone can go in and reproduce. As a colleague of mine, Adam Waterson is known to say, it doesn’t do you any good to build some sophisticated, complex solution if you’re the only one who knows how to work it.
#7 – Program Templates
Once you’ve built out a fully tokenized program, it’s a great idea to create a template version that you clone from. I like to do this for things like content and events, as I like to have a pre-built package ready to go when I have new content. So the reason you want to have a template, versus just cloning the last used program, is that anything custom you might have had to add to the program will carry over as well.
I find this is especially helpful for the rest of my team as well, as they can easily duplicate something we build all the time. You can even take it a step further with default tokens that indicate what you should do with each token. For example, the dimensions needed for the perfect banner image.
#8 – Centralized Content Programs
This one could have a whole article devoted to it, which I’ll probably spin up eventually. But here’s the gist of it:
Suppose you’ve got a new whitepaper, and want to promote it on several different channels. Ordinarily, you might think it wise to build each channel separately. Build your display ads that point to the whitepaper download page. Link to it in social, etc.
The problem with this is that you can’t track the utilization of a piece of content across channels in one place, and you can’t efficiently compare which channels performed better for the content than others.
There’s a way in Marketo that you can centralize your content so that all channels point to the same core assets.
Essentially, it means creating a specific program for each piece of content you produce. Here’s an example of one of our whitepapers. This program has a special type created for it called “content”, and every channel that uses it: online advertising, content syndication, and even sends from your sales team, are all sent to the assets that are in this program.
Through this, you can see any download activity on this content in one place.
If you create a template for your sales team to share this resource, you should point them to an asset stored in this program. You can then track and clicks on the download link there are a conversion.
If someone accesses the content from a nurture campaign, you can track that here too.
The other value to this process is that any changes you need to make down the line to the content can be done in just one place, rather than trying to find every email, landing page, etc that uses the asset. Plus, going back to a previous tip, you can tokenize much of the content in these programs, making cloning and tweaks really easy.
#9 – Picklist ALL the Things
So if you’ve been using Marketo for awhile, you’ve probably come across this issue already, but standardized lists of data are so much easier to work with than text entry. Here’s what I mean. Suppose on your form, you ask a lead’s job title. Pretty harmless right? Then you get asked to build a persona-targeted campaign, and you realize how many different ways someone can spell (or misspell) a job title.
This goes back to the adage of “bad data in, bad data out.” But you can circumvent a lot of headache later by being smart with the way you collect data in your forms. Identify the areas where you can bucket values, rather than asking the precise value. (pull screenshot of Marketo guide that shows accuracy of form data). It’s probably not going to be all that accurate if you ask an exact value, and it’s not terribly actionable for your marketing efforts. So use select fields for things like job title, industry, company size, revenue size, and other identifying aspects.
#10 – Triggers for Standardizing Data
For the data that you want standardized, but can’t necessarily put in picklists, I’ve got a solution for you there, too. (or if you just need to do a bit of spring cleaning)
A simple example looks at incorrect formatting of country values, and fixes them. Basically, it watches for values containing certain words or abbreviations and rewriting them to the appropriate standardized value. It’s not a perfect solution because stuff will fall through the filters you build, but I like to audit what these don’t catch every month or so and build the missing non-standard values into the normalizer as well. Eventually, you’ll have most circumstances covered well. The opportunities to do this are endless, too. Think job titles, industries, etc. You can’t currently do anything fancy with wildcards or case changes, though. SO YOU’LL NEED TO FIND ANOTHER WAY TO FIX ALL THE DATA FROM PEOPLE WHO TYPE LIKE THIS ON YOUR FORMS.
#11 – Segmentations as Smart List Filters
If you’ve ever made use of Marketo’s dynamic content feature, you’re probably familiar with how Segmentations work. But you may not know the power of using segmentations within smart campaigns.
For frequently used filters, such as lead owner, industry, job role, etc, these can be super handy. Remembering all the commonly used filters you need for a campaign can be tricky, but by using a segmentation to contain all those filters, the only filter you need to remember in your blasts is the segmentation. There used to be some debate that using segmentations instead of straight field filters was actually a faster way to generate a list, though in my testing I haven’t seen any speed benefit either way.
In any case, they’re a lot more convenient, especially when you’re dealing with a piece of data that can change often.
#12 – Lead Source Tracking with URL Variables
You are probably already tracking lead source on your different forms with a hidden value. This works, by basically tagging any lead that comes through the form with the lead source value you specified. It works, but it’s limiting, especially if you move to using more global forms where you’re leveraging one form for multiple assets.
To do this, a great solution can be in switching your lead source value on forms to be assigned based on URL parameter. Here’s how you do it. In your form, go into the autofill settings of the field, and change the “Get value” field to “URL parameter”. You’ll need to set a default value of some kind, but in the parameter name, put whatever URL parameter you want to use. This is somewhat arbitrary, you can use pretty much any parameter name you want. Yours could just be “leadsource”, if you want to keep it simple. We tend to follow the old utm tracking naming conventions.
Once you’ve done this, all you need to remember to do is when linking to your landing page that uses the form, append the appropriate URL variable to the end. This is so handy because it means you’re not only using your forms efficiently- but you’re suddenly able to get visibility to channels you may not have had great data on before. Social media comes to mind for me- it just isn’t something something I have a good handle on lead gen from, but now I can track any content, infographic and event and be confident that I’ll get accurate lead source data.
The only catch to this is you need to remember to tag your URLs before using them. This is more about building habit than anything,
And lucky for you, Marketo has a built in tool for that. On any landing page, you can find the URL builder in the settings. It will look up any hidden values you have on the form that are set to accept URL variables, and you can generate your URLs easily.
#13 – Tokenized Lead Scoring
You may have noticed the score token, but not have had a great idea of how to use it. Lead scoring systems can be pretty complex, and even harder to audit and adjust later. Score tokens can help here. To use them, you first need to have your scoring contained in a program.
For each of your triggered scoring rules, instead of assigning +10 or -20 points, you’re actually assigning a token value. Then, on the program token settings, you can view all your score changes in one place, and adjust them accordingly. This is really handy when you want to take a glance at the different score changes that could occur, and also helpful if you have multiple triggers that are affected by the same score change.
Also, here’s a freebie: if you’re starting from scratch with your lead scoring, there’s a great program pre-built in Marketo that you can import. You can find the importer in marketing activities, and there are actually a ton of fantastic starter programs in here beyond the scoring program.
#14 – Tokens in Interesting Moments
Interesting moments are such a valuable way to pass insight to your sales teams, but a lot of people use them incorrectly. Usually, you have the basics in there: fills out a high value form, visits web pages, critical piece of information is learned. While these work great in theory, the way they’re conveyed to the sales team is not always very clear. The problem is that basic interesting moments just take the raw asset names in Marketo, and push them to Salesforce.
Here’s what I mean. Put yourself in the sales person’s shoes. What the heck is LandingpageA1441-September2014aconvertedpage?
The cool thing is, you can actually make these interesting moments more…well, interesting, by building them through tokens. So, as long as you followed my past suggestions on using tokens wherever possible, you can build interesting moments on your programs that use token data instead of gibberish asset names.
Now the salesperson can see a much clearer view of what the lead has been up to.
#15 – Folder Tokens
I’ve been talking a lot about tokens at the program level, but you can actually set these at the folder level, too, which can lead to some interesting use cases.
Probably the most common benefit is with copyrights and key contact information. You update this stuff at least once a year. Normally, that’s a time consuming process in Marketo, because you have to edit the template, and then approve all the assets that use the template. BUT! If you set your copyright info and other high level information that may change (logos are another opportunity here) in tokens, you can use folder tokens to your advantage here.
Then you can set your token by clicking any folder in your Marketing Activities section of Marketo, and navigating to the My Tokens section. Of course if you’re setting a very universal piece of information like copyright, you’ll want a top-level folder that contains all your other folders, but this is never a bad idea, and goes back to the very first tip I talked about regarding folder organization.
The other really cool thing about folder tokens is they can nest. In other words, you can set a copyright token at one folder at the top level, but other tokens in folders at lower levels, and finally tokens within programs at the lowest level. Plus, if you set a token value of your global HQ address as the top-level folder token, you can override it with a token in a folder (or a program beneath it). So your Canadian and eEuropean teams can use their local office locations for their folders, and you can use your address for your folders.
Now the next time that your office moves to a new location, you rebrand, your company gets acquired, or you just enter the next year, you’ve built your systems smart to allow you to make an update in one place and have all assets affected immediately, with no approval required. One super annoying disclaimer to this process: Tokens DO NOT work with emails published to sales insight. So keep in mind that any emails you’re publishing to your sales team must have all {{my.Tokens}} removed. You’ve been warned!
So that’s it! If you have ideas to add or want to know more, submit a comment or tweet me. I’m @TheJeffShearer.
Comments
37 responses to “15 Marketo Protips: Advice You Can Implement Today”
[…] the past I’ve discussed how to centralize your content tracking through Marketo programs. You can do the same with videos too, and log a program success when a lead plays one of your […]
[…] Setup Interesting Moments to start collecting data. Jeff Shearer (@TheJeffShearer) has some great tips on how to leverage tokens in tip #14 in his 15 Marketo Protips article. […]
[…] Setup Interesting Moments to start collecting data. Jeff Shearer (@TheJeffShearer) has some great tips on how to leverage tokens in tip #14 in his 15 Marketo Protips article. […]
[…] Setup Interesting Moments to start collecting data. Jeff Shearer (@TheJeffShearer) has some great tips on how to leverage tokens in tip #14 in his 15 Marketo Protips article. […]
[…] step you should take is in adopting some global assets, particularly with your forms (See #4 in this post for more on that […]
Hi Jeff!
This is great thank you – I came to this post looking specifically for information around Lead Source / Lead Source Detail.
As a Lead interacts with multiple programs we would like to track how the Lead entered the program.
E.g. We have a whitepaper on a landing page which will attract leads (new and existing) from multiple origins (social, other websites, email list) etc. We want to be able to report on how many leads interacted with that White Paper as well as how they got there. The Lead Source or Lead Source Detail field doesn’t seem to cater this because it can (and should) be overwritten – losing the point in time value.
Does that make sense?
What do you think?
Hey Justin,
Great question. There’s a few ways people go about this sort of thing, though they all have pros and cons.
Thats all I can think of at the moment – this is a common problem to solve, but there isn’t a definitive way to do it. Many people pursue a combination of approaches. I, for example, currently use Bizible, but I do also have some homegrown concatenation and workflows running to supplement it. Hope this helps!
Jeff, great article. What I am really bummed about is there seems to be no way to track clicks on a landing page. I have a series of landing pages set up that drive traffic to my website to sign up for an account but I can’t seem to see how many people click my button to the site. I can see visits to the landing page but that is it. Why does Marketo not show that stat similar to the way it does a email?
Hey Nick – Marketo does track clicks on a landing page, it just doesn’t roll that data up in an overview on the landing page in the same way that an email send would show clicks in an email performance report. You can build triggers and filters using the “Click Link” action (Not to be confused with “Click Email”). If you wanted to see how many people (and which people specifically) clicked a link on a landing page, you could build a smart list that uses the Click Link filter, and that should give you the results you need (just remember that activity log data like this archives after 90 days, so if you want longer reaching data, be sure to use a static list).
Hope this helps!
But this would only track known leads right? It would not track people who came say from an ad campaign on FB and clicked on the link but didnt sign up and become leads? Does that make sense? Thanks for the quick response!
Nick – You can actually trigger and filter on anonymous leads too. So you could build a trigger that looks for clicks on landingpage.html, with an additional filter of “Is Anonymous = True”, and then add all those leads to a static list, or write to an interesting moment or whatever.
Conversely, since these would technically be anonymous leads that you couldn’t uniquely identify anyway, you could opt to use a goal completion report in Google Analytics to infer the same end result. Up to you!
Just an FYI, the ability to filter on anonymous leads within a smart list will no longer work. Marketo is removing this feature when the February release is deployed. See this post in the community for more info: https://nation.marketo.com/thread/29372
Ah you’re right – good to know!
Jeff – really appreciate the write up responding to my question above – thank you so much.
I particularly like the idea of snapshot on the Campaign Member. Thanks again for such great content.
Jeff, great tips! We are already using Programs for events and content (e.g., white papers) and plan on using lead source tracking with URL variables for tracking all the activity we engage in (e.g., AdWords) to promote these Programs. What do you, however, recommend for tracking specific activity (e.g., 2016 Q1 AdWords campaign for XYZ)? We could always create a custom field to use, such as Specific Lead Source or Lead Source Detail, but we want to use OOTB fields/functionality as much as possible. Getting too custom with our tracking might cause us to run into eventual issues with Analytics and Revenue Explorer, which we definitely want to avoid. Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
Hey Randy – That’s a good question, and one that can be endlessly debated on the “right” way to do it. The main question is where you plan to do most of your reporting. If it’s Marketo revenue cycle analytics, really the only way to answer both the source and offer tracking questions is sub programs. So for each offer, a whitepaper for instance, you must create a program for each possible lead source that would drive to it. Then, in the revenue cycle explorer, any program successes will show up in your reporting.
The biggest challenge with this approach is the scale, and being consistent with it. For example, Do I create a sub program for all AdWords in 2016? A specific branded keyword ad group? All paid search? As you can imagine, the scale to manage this can get out of control pretty quickly, even if you were just looking at broad channels. Plus it means every time you release a new asset or event, you have to recreate all these sub programs every time. This can be expedited somewhat with preset program “templates” that you clone, but it’s still an ugly, time consuming process.
The challenge is inherently in Marketo reporting, which is entirely dependent on program membership statuses. FWIW, I have moved entirely away from Marketo’s built in reporting (Besides basic email performance reports) in favor of either Salesforce-based or other 3rd party reporting tools. I believe Marketo has an amazing suite of features to offer, but reporting in my opinion, is not one of them.
Sorry I don’t have a better answer than this, though it’s a question I get asked enough that I plan to work on a guide to address it.
Thanks for the feedback Jeff! What did you wind up deciding on for tracking offers, if not setting up a sub program for each (which I agree doesn’t sound ideal)? Do you just have your UTM parameters mapped to certain fields?
Randy – All my forms contain hidden UTM capture fields that are written to via a cookie. Those map to fields that allow updates, so they’re in effect my “last touch” fields. I then have a separate set of utm fields that only accept the first value, these being my “first touch” fields. Finally, I have one other field I call “utm stream” that captures a concatenated list of all last touch utm variables. So any time a new form is submitted, the parameters that were submitted are tacked on to the end of a long string of values. This last field is sort of a CYA field in case I ever need to troubleshoot a tracking issue. It is extremely clunky for any sort of serious reporting.
I DO use programs to track the high level offer (aka whitepaper, contact-us, webinar registration) and tie all that activity to salesforce campaigns. But these track all downloads from all sources – they don’t parse out where each interaction came from.
We typically use Bizible for that layer of insight- which essentially captures every web session and its related utm parameters, and allows you to run your offer/source, and attribution reporting. That said, if you didn’t want to invest in that sort of tool, a workaround would be to build the campaign member snapshotting system I mentioned in an earlier comment (and will try and write up soon). Essentially with it, you’re logging on the campaign member what the “last touch” utm parameter fields were when a lead interacted with the salesforce campaign. Doing this will let you report on a lead’s utm values as they were when they downloaded a particular whitepaper in the past, even if they’ve consumed other offers since then.
The takeaway here is that there isn’t one way to do this, nor is it necessarily an easy fix. But hopefully this gets a few ideas for you. I’ll definitely try and produce a more in-depth guide on this in the future, as this seems to be a hot question 🙂
Hope this helps!
Hi Jeff,
This was a great post and definitely worth the read. I just learned that I can use tokens at the folder level. Thanks for making time for the greater good. 😉
You wouldn’t happen to know if you can pull a custom token into the Admin > Email area?
For example:
This email was sent to {{lead.Email Address}}. If you no longer wish to receive these emails you may unsubscribe at any time. {{my.CustomToken}}
I couldn’t get it to work; it may not be possible or I might not be doing it right.
Hey Seth,
Thank you – it always helps to get the feedback so I know what sort of stuff to write in the future.
It’s been awhile since I’ve used that admin email setting. Instead, I actually hard code the unsubscribe token and “view in web page” stuff into my templates directly using system tokens (Check out this system tokens guide). I believe I did this originally because I couldn’t figure out a way to get tokens of any kind to work in those admin settings, so I suspect they still don’t work, based on what you’re describing.
The system tokens are great because you can control how they are styled and placed in the email, plus you can use additional tokens like {{my.tokens}} and {{lead.tokens}} to your heart’s content.
The only catch with these is that if you need to send an operational email and do not want to display the unsubscribe link, you have to manually remove it from the email in the editor. But I generally like to give my leads the option to unsubscribe regardless of the type of email I’m sending. In the off chance that I do need to remove unsubscribe language, I’ve found it’s not too much work to manage this manually.
Hope this helps!
Hey Jeff can you customize URL’s from .html in Marketo. So example http://www.website.com/page.html to http://www.website.com/page I don’t see this rewrite functionality in Marketo.
Thanks
Not that I know of – the only way around that structure would probably be to use non-Marketo pages and embed your forms.
-Jeff
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for this wealth of good information! Regarding #14 (Tokens in IMs): In order to implement this, I’ll need to create Interesting Moment-populating flows within each program (in order to take advantage of the program-specific label tokens), correct? Currently I have all of my IM campaigns within a single lead-scoring program. I can’t think a way to maintain the centrality of the IM program while taking advantage of program-level tokens. Am I correct, or am I overlooking something?
Thanks so much!
Heather
Heather,
You’re correct. The smart campaigns that create the IM must be local to the program. It was a little tough for me to justify this change at first, however I’ve found that the “global” IMs that Marketo comes with out of the box weren’t all that useful for my sales team. They’d say things like “visited web page: URL” or “was sent email: Email name”, but the internal naming conventions of all our assets was somewhat confusing to them. So instead, I view interesting moments within a program as an opportunity to create no-nonsense details in the IM feed. I can write IMs like “Registered for Webinar: The Power of Tokens”, which to my sales team is a heck of a lot more helpful than “filled out form: FM-FullName-No-Geo-Webinar-Registration”.
You can also make the IM token conversion easier by adopting templates for your programs that have all the tokens and smart campaign logic sitting in them, ready to go. Then all that’s needed is customizing a couple of tokens, and switching on the smart campaigns. Of course this could eventually mean phasing out your global IMs entirely (that’s what I’ve done), so it’s a bit more time consuming to implement.
Sorry for the bad news, but in any case, I hope this helps!
-Jeff
Very helpful; just wanted to confirm before I go change all of my IM campaigns. I think it will be worth the effort. Thanks!
You bet. I made the change a few years ago and I’ve never looked back. Best of luck!
We are very interested in utilizing global forms (using a single form on multiple landing pages) but haven’t been able to find any documentation on how to build those out.
At present, we’re buried under a mountain of single-use assets and managing this amount of data, not to mention updating these forms, is proving problematic for our small marketing core.
Any thoughts on where to get more information on setting up ‘global forms’?
Hey Neal,
Responded to you via email. This may be a worthwhile topic to blow out into its own article, as there is a lot of value here, and I glossed over it a bit here. Thanks!
Jeff,
Cannot express how much I appreciated your support and well defined explanation on our Marketo question. I’ve bookmarked this site and will be checking back (and probably asking additional questions) often. 😉
Jeff, how are you guys currently tracking inbound lead source types (e.g., organic search). What we currently have set up to track this are smart campaigns that read the referrer URLs (e.g., starts with “http://www.google.com”) and assign corresponding lead source types (e.g., organic search). This seems to be working, but I was just wondering if there was an easier way of doing this. Thanks in advance for the feedback!
Hi Jeff!
Fantastic article – thank you! I have a question around Global Forms on Embeded External Landing Pages. I have about 10 whitepaper landing pages that I’m about to build out. I’d like to use 1 global “Content Download” form on these 10 landing pages, and sync each form submission to 10 separate Salesforce Campaigns. How should I setup my Smart List so that the leads only sync to the proper Salesforce campaign based on the whitepaper they download?
Hey Krista,
Great question. Here’s how I’d do it using one form:
1. Make sure munchkin script is installed on any external pages where you want to use the form
2. Build one global content download form stored in some central place (I have a “Global Assets” program I use for this kind of thing), and embed it on all the pages you need it on.
3. Build a separate program for each piece of content you want to track, each containing a smart campaign with the trigger “filled out form”, and a “web page is” constraint. This will allow you to use the same form, but have it trigger differently depending on the page it is used on.
Where you may find it gets more complex is in directing users to the right asset after the form fill. You can set conditional logic on the form to send to different thank you pages depending on info submitted on the form, which may work here. You could also opt to simply send them all to a generic thank you page, and deliver the asset via an email autoresponder. I prefer the latter as it improves the quality of data you’ll get through your forms. But that’s a whole other topic :).
Hope this helps!
-Jeff
Hey Randy,
Sorry for the huge delay in my response, I must have just missed this on my notifications. Honestly, this is a bit of a tricky area, there’s no silver bullet that I’ve seen. What you mention is basically what we do. We first set a default value on our forms that specifies an initial lead source. I then have a series of “new lead processing” smart camapigns that further sanitize the data. One element they look at is the first touch UTM parameters, referrer URLs, etc. If they find a more specific lead source in that data, then they overwrite the default lead status with something more descriptive.
Another method would be to use a 3rd party tool like Bizible – since that tool in particular tracks source data prior to the lead even identifying themselves on a form, you could argue it’s even more accurate. That said, I’ve found its data is most useful for digital lead sources. It tends to be less reliable for offline lead sources.
From the sound of it, you’re probably doing it the same way I would. In any case, hope this helps (4 months later :))
-Jeff
Thank you Jeff!! This is SUCH a big help. I didn’t think about the TY page… Any recommendations on how I can replicate this Marketing LP experience? https://www.marketo.com/definitive-guides/lead-generation/ (Download button goes to specific asset and the asset is immediately downloaded)
Thank you again!
P.S. I ran into some reporting errors after using “Website” as a constraint — so submitted a Marketo ticket. They told me that it’s actually better to use “Referrer” because “Website” as a constraint is typically used for Marketo landing pages. (In my case, I’m using external landing pages.)
Hey Krista – You could probably do it with hidden values on the form that are set via URL or referrer parameters, and then use that information to dictate what page the form sends the user to (via the form settings). That would probably be the most straightforward method.
Good to know about the referrer constraint – I’ll have to give that a try on my end too.
Hi Jeff.
Thanks first of all for this great article.
You mentioned an article that explains how to account for multiple campaign influences on the campaign member object in Salesforce. Did you have a chance to locate it? Our challenge: We have a lead that came in via a specific program eg. “Mobile Whitepaper 2016”. Acquisition program would be “Mobile Whitepaper 2016” as well as UTM Campaign. If this lead then interacts with other content, let’s say signs up for “Webinar X”, utm parameters would then be overriden while (original) Acquisition program stays the same. What would you recommend could I do in order to account for all the other campaign touches on the lead level so by looking at the lead in Salesforce a salesperson can see all the campaigns a lead has interacted with? Thanks a lot in advance!
Fabian
Hey Fabian,
First off, sorry for the long delay in my reply. It seems I’m no longer getting email notifications when people send comments, so I just now noticed this.
Second, great question! This is really the classic marketing attribution challenge. UTM fields on a lead or contact record are, for me, a measurement of the “last touch”. They get overwritten, so only the most recent piece of info is visible on them. And that’s useful on its own, but you want to see all the historical touches. The trick is to translate the value in your UTM fields to something that’s a bit more permanent. For me, I like to associate leads to marketo programs, and by extension, salesforce campaigns, whenever a “marketing touch” occurs. So if a lead fills out a contact form, there’s a dedicated marketo program they get associated to. Then, when they download a whitepaper or register for a webinar weeks later, they get added to additional programs along the way.
If you’re writing this data to salesforce campaigns, then each campaign association will appear on the lead (or contact) record, and visible to the sales person working the lead. It will even show them in chronological order. You can also then report on this info using out of the box salesforce reports like Campaign Influence or Campaign Member reports, or use the data with a 3rd party reporting tool like Full Circle Bright funnel, etc.
I know I’m generalizing a bit here, but I hope this helps somewhat – definitely let me know if you have any further questions.
Best,
-Jeff